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Nestled in central Saudi Arabia, the tranquil oasis town of Al-Kharj has long been a beloved escape. For generations, overstretched residents of nearby Riyadh have flocked here to unwind, drawn by its lush palm-lined avenues, world-famous sweet dates, and green agricultural landscapes that stand out dramatically against the kingdom’s endless expanses of arid desert. Today, however, this once-peaceful retreat finds itself at the heart of escalating regional conflict, its quiet daily routine disrupted by the constant threat of incoming projectiles.

Al-Kharj’s proximity to the sprawling Prince Sultan Air Base, a critical military installation that once hosted U.S. command operations during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has put the town directly in the line of fire. Following the joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran that launched on February 28, Tehran has launched repeated waves of attacks targeting Gulf states it accuses of enabling American military operations. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has openly claimed that Saudi Arabia hosts advanced U.S. fighter jets including F-35s and F-16s at Prince Sultan, alongside refueling and storage infrastructure, making the base a priority target.

Last month, multiple U.S. media outlets confirmed that at least a dozen American service members were wounded in an Iranian attack on the base. While Iranian officials have publicly claimed they destroyed a high-value advanced surveillance aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars, additional reports confirm several U.S. aerial refueling tankers also sustained damage in the strike.

For Al-Kharj’s 350,000 residents, the conflict has already spilled into civilian life. The town recorded Saudi Arabia’s first civilian casualties from the current wave of tensions on March 8, when two migrant workers were killed after a projectile crashed into a residential neighborhood. Just last week, two local residents were injured when debris from an intercepted drone fell onto three private homes, and a separate incident damaged six additional properties, according to official Saudi statements.

Despite the repeated strikes and growing risk, however, most Al-Kharj residents have maintained remarkable stoicism, adapting their daily routines rather than succumbing to panic. “We hear the loud booms of missile interceptions, but we rarely spot anything in the sky,” 66-year-old local Abdullah told AFP, requesting only his first name be published due to strict Saudi security sensitivity. Speaking after afternoon prayers at his neighborhood mosque, Abdullah noted: “This is all very new for Al-Kharj, but life goes on as normal — there’s no panic, no change to how we live.”

Government worker Turki, who also only shared his first name, explained that while the town’s newfound place in global headlines has led friends and family across the country to check in constantly, daily public life continues uninterrupted. During a recent lunch rush at a local popular restaurant, AFP observed diners scrolling through war updates on their phones between bites of traditional rice and meat dishes, a small routine adaptation that underscores how residents have integrated the new risk into everyday life.

Even younger residents, who openly acknowledge their fear, refuse to alter their daily schedules. Twenty-one-year-old student Batool, sipping coffee at a downtown cafe, admitted: “I would be lying if I said I’m not afraid when I hear the explosions, or when I heard about the foreign workers who died. But I’m not letting fear change how I live. As you can see, I’m still studying outside, my routine hasn’t shifted at all because of the war.”

While AFP observed no heavy deployment of additional security forces around the town despite the regular strikes, residents confirm the threat is always lingering. Mobile phones regularly receive alert warnings of incoming attacks, and concerns about the next barrage never fully fade.

The presence of U.S. forces at Prince Sultan Air Base carries long-standing geopolitical weight. American troops first withdrew from the base in the early 2000s, after decades of controversy: conservative factions of Saudi society have long viewed foreign military presence on the soil of Islam’s two holiest sites as a religious insult, a grievance infamously cited by Osama bin Laden as a core justification for the September 11 attacks. U.S. forces only returned to the base in 2019 under a new bilateral agreement between Washington and Riyadh, with initial reports indicating hundreds of personnel would be stationed there.

Easter Sunday, one of the holiest days on the Christian calendar, took on a somber tone across Lebanon this year, as worshippers centered their prayers and celebrations on the hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped in the country’s southern border region, where relentless clashes between Israel and Hezbollah have turned once-quiet communities into active conflict zones.

The annual joy of the resurrection was woven through with urgent calls for peace, as communities across the country opened their churches to displaced southern residents and demonstrated unwavering solidarity with those caught in the crossfire. At a parish church in Jdeideh, a northern suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut, turnout for Easter mass far outstripped the building’s capacity. Crowds spilled out of the pews and onto the sidewalk outside, as worshippers gathered to stand with their compatriots in the south.

Jenny Yazbek al-Jamal, a 55-year-old Beirut resident who leads the parish choir and has family members still residing in southern conflict zones, said this year’s Easter festivities were explicitly dedicated to all people displaced and endangered by the border fighting. “It is not only Christian villages suffering in this war,” al-Jamal told reporters after mass. “Muslim villages too… we stand with all the people of the south who were forced to flee their homes.”

Inside the packed church, placards listing the names of cut-off and embattled Christian southern villages lined the base of the altar, a quiet, visible tribute to communities trapped between warring factions. Even in the capital, the shadow of the conflict was impossible to ignore: the roar of low-flying Israeli fighter jets, which regularly break the sound barrier over Beirut to intimidate local populations, drowned out portions of the hymns sung by the parish choir. al-Jamal noted that the constant overflights have become a new normal, even during the holiest days of the Christian calendar. “Even during our religious holidays, even on Good Friday, jets fly over us and break the sound barrier just to scare us,” she said.

Worsppers across the country echoed her calls for an end to the fighting, describing the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in the south as a crisis that impacts all Lebanese, regardless of faith. Marina Awad, another 55-year-old worshipper who attended mass with her husband, called for an immediate end to hostilities, saying she was heartbroken by the scale of displacement. “It’s truly very sad to know people had to abandon homes built over a lifetime, unsure if they will ever return,” she said.

The situation for civilians who remain in border villages is catastrophic, according to 65-year-old Dori Ghrayeb, who outlined the collapse of basic services in embattled communities. “No food, no water, no bread, no medicine, and no medical care,” he said, adding his voice to widespread calls for a ceasefire. “I am for peace; the war must stop so that we can sit at the same table.”

The depth of the crisis was highlighted this weekend by the last-minute cancellation of a high-profile humanitarian aid convoy that had been organized jointly by the Vatican’s envoy to Lebanon, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), and two prominent Lebanese Christian charities. The convoy, which was carrying 40 tonnes of life-saving medicine and essential basic supplies, had been scheduled to reach the border village of Debl, one of several majority Christian frontier villages trapped between advancing Israeli forces and Hezbollah fighters.

The Maronite Patriarchate, Lebanon’s largest Christian church body, issued a statement Sunday expressing “deep disappointment” over the cancellation, which was announced for unspecified security reasons. Several key Christian border communities, including Ain Ebel, Rmeich and Debl, have become focal points of the conflict in recent weeks. Local residents have rejected repeated Israeli calls to evacuate the area, insisting they have no stake in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Many have spoken of feeling abandoned after official Lebanese military forces withdrew from multiple border positions in the region, leaving civilians to fend for themselves.

Caritas-Lebanon and L’Oeuvre d’Orient, the two charities that partnered on the aid mission, issued a joint statement condemning the cancellation as a clear violation of international humanitarian law, emphasizing that the decision punishes vulnerable civilians who are already trapped in life-threatening conditions. As Easter celebrations close across Lebanon, the collective call for peace from Christian communities adds to growing international pressure to de-escalate the border conflict and open unimpeded access for humanitarian aid to trapped civilian populations.

A high-stakes, cross-border standoff has erupted following the downing of an American F-15E strike fighter over southwestern Iran late last week, as U.S. President Donald Trump and Iranian authorities offer sharply conflicting accounts of what unfolded during a frantic mission to recover a wounded U.S. airman. With details still murky and disinformation circulating rapidly across social media, a review of public statements and established media reports sheds light on one of the most tense covert operations involving the two hostile nations in recent years.

The downed aircraft, a cutting-edge F-15E, crashed in the mountainous terrain of Iran’s Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province last Friday. According to Trump administration accounts, the jet’s two crew members ejected after the crash; the pilot was recovered by U.S. special operations forces hours after the incident, while the second crew member — a weapons system operator — remained missing, sparking a days-long race for his capture or rescue. Little has been disclosed about the airman’s identity, but U.S. officials quoted by Axios and The New York Times have offered some details of his journey after ejecting: wounded but able to move, he climbed a 2,100-meter mountain ridgeline before sheltering in a rocky crevice, and reportedly radioed the phrase “God is good” to waiting U.S. teams, a nod to his personal religious faith. Like all U.S. military aviators deployed to high-risk regions, he had completed rigorous Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training ahead of the mission, and carried a combat vest outfitted with a GPS-enabled location beacon, communications equipment, emergency rations, first aid supplies, and a sidearm for self-defense. Trump confirmed Sunday the airman had sustained serious injuries, and CBS News later reported he had been evacuated to a U.S. medical facility in Kuwait for treatment.

From the moment the jet crashed, both sides recognized the high strategic and political stakes of capturing or recovering the airman. Iranian security forces immediately mobilized local communities and tribal groups to scour the remote mountain region, aiming to take the U.S. crew member alive for leverage against Washington. That set off a urgent race against time, as U.S. military and intelligence assets moved to locate and extract the downed aviator before Iranian forces could close in.

U.S. media reports, citing anonymous senior administration officials, outline how the operation unfolded: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) took a leading role in pinpointing the airman’s location and launched a elaborate deception campaign designed to mislead Iranian forces into believing the airman had already been captured, drawing Iranian search teams away from his actual hiding spot. Overnight between Saturday and Sunday, a large-scale extraction force was deployed: according to Trump, the mission involved dozens of U.S. aircraft, and U.S. media reports confirm the force included hundreds of special operations personnel, including the elite Navy SEAL Team 6 — the same unit that carried out the 2011 raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Attack aircraft provided overwatch and fire support for the SEAL team as they moved in to extract the airman as Iranian security forces were converging on his location. U.S. forces engaged Iranian personnel to hold them back during the extraction, and Trump has confirmed no U.S. service members were killed in the operation. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also confirmed Monday that Trump thanked Israel for unspecified assistance during the mission, though no further details of Israel’s role have been released.

The competing narrative from Tehran directly contradicts the White House’s account. Iranian military officials have claimed the entire U.S. rescue operation was “completely foiled,” though they have not released a full, detailed accounting of the incident that matches the U.S. version. On Sunday evening, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards released an image via the ISNA news agency claiming to show the skull of an American serviceman recovered from the jet’s wreckage, calling the incident a “humiliating defeat” for what they termed “the liar Trump.”

Iranian military spokesperson Ebrahim Zolfaghari told state media that U.S. forces used an abandoned airfield in Isfahan province, northwest of the crash site, to stage what he described as a “deception and escape mission” under the cover of recovering the downed airman. Iranian state media broadcast footage of charred plane wreckage in a desert region, and claimed U.S. forces lost two C-130 military transport planes and two Black Hawk helicopters during the failed operation. Open-source geolocation experts have confirmed the footage was shot roughly 50 kilometers south of the city of Isfahan. U.S. officials quoted by The Wall Street Journal have acknowledged that two C-130s became stuck in soft terrain during the operation, and were deliberately destroyed by U.S. forces to prevent sensitive technology from falling into Iranian hands before the remaining teams were airlifted out by other aircraft.

Local Iranian officials have added further conflicting details: the governor of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province told the Mehr news agency that five people were killed and seven wounded in clashes in the Kuh-e Siah mountain region, but denied any U.S. forces had landed in the province, calling those reports “completely false and have no validity.” In his Sunday statement, Trump also referenced a second, unconfirmed rescue mission for another downed pilot inside Iran that he chose not to announce publicly to avoid risking the operation, though no further details of that second mission have emerged.

In the absence of independent on-the-ground reporting from the remote region, many details of the incident remain unconfirmed, and social media platforms have been flooded with doctored and misleading images related to the crash and rescue, making it harder to verify competing claims from the two adversarial governments.

A new wave of deadly Israeli airstrikes across Lebanon on Sunday left at least 15 people dead, one day after Israeli threats targeting the Masnaa crossing—Lebanon’s primary land gateway to Syria—forced the vital trade and transit point to shut down.

The escalation marks an intensification of months of open conflict that began on March 2, when the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah joined the broader Middle East war in support of its principal backer, Iran. Since that date, Israel has conducted sustained airstrikes across Lebanese territory and launched a ground invasion into southern Lebanon. On Sunday, Israeli military chief Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir visited frontline troops stationed in southern Lebanon and publicly reaffirmed his commitment to ramp up offensive operations against Hezbollah.

The Lebanese Ministry of Health confirmed that Sunday’s strikes spread far beyond the contested southern border zone, reaching population centers near the capital Beirut. A strike on Beirut’s Jnah neighborhood killed at least five people and wounded 52 others, while an attack on an apartment building in Ain Saadeh, a town just east of the capital, left three dead and three more injured. In the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Hatta, located far from the Israeli border, a Sunday strike killed seven people, including a four-year-old girl.

In a rare offensive claim Sunday, Hezbollah announced it had launched a cruise missile against an Israeli warship patrolling off the Lebanese coast. But the Israeli military told Agence France-Presse (AFP) it had no record of such an incident occurring.

According to official Lebanese data, more than 1,400 people have been killed in Israeli attacks across Lebanon since the outbreak of the latest conflict, 126 of whom are children. Over one million Lebanese have been displaced by the violence.

Medical sources told AFP that the Jnah neighborhood strike landed just 100 meters from Rafik Hariri University Hospital, Lebanon’s largest public medical facility. Zakaria Tawbeh, the hospital’s deputy head, said the facility received four fatal casualties – three Sudanese nationals and a 15-year-old girl – plus 31 wounded patients. “Lots of glass was broken, and some of our patients had panic attacks,” Tawbeh told reporters.

For local residents, the strikes represent a repeated cycle of trauma. Nancy Hassan, a 53-year-old Jnah resident, said she believed she would be safe in her home after the first strike of the day. “Shortly after, the planes were flying overhead, and we heard a huge bang, then stones rained down on us,” she recalled. Hassan already lost her 23-year-old daughter to an Israeli strike on the same neighborhood during the 2024 Hezbollah-Israel war, and four of her daughter’s friends were killed in Sunday’s attack. “Every time, they bomb us in the neighbourhood without warning,” she added.

Israel also carried out multiple strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold that has been almost entirely evacuated in recent months. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has issued a warning that exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah near UN peacekeeping positions raise the risk of accidental retaliatory attacks on UN personnel.

The closure of the Masnaa border crossing followed explicit Israeli threats made Saturday. Israeli military Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said the crossing would be targeted because Hezbollah uses it for military activity and to smuggle weapons and combat equipment, urging all civilians to evacuate the area immediately. The Lebanese side of the crossing was evacuated within hours. While Syrian border and customs director Mazen Aloush emphasized the crossing is used exclusively for civilian travel and trade, it was temporarily shuttered in response to the imminent threat.

Masnaa is a critical economic artery for both Lebanon and Syria, and a key travel hub for Lebanese residents seeking access to the broader Middle East. Military analyst Hassan Jouni told AFP that Israel’s threat to target the crossing is not rooted in legitimate security concerns, but instead is intended to pressure the Lebanese government to take action to disarm Hezbollah.

With Masnaa closed, travelers have flooded alternative border crossings. At the northern Qaa crossing, an AFP correspondent on Sunday observed long lines of cars and vans waiting to cross into Syria, as people sought alternate routes to reach their destinations.

As Israeli forces push deeper into southern Lebanese border areas, destroying entire villages in their advance, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun has repeated his call for diplomatic negotiations with Israel to avert full-scale destruction similar to that seen in the Gaza Strip. “Why don’t we negotiate… until we can at least save the homes that have not yet been destroyed?” Aoun said in a televised address to the nation.